Pot shop buzzing: Production rolls along at marijuana grower in Fitchburg

Sunday

Jan 7, 2018 at 6:00 AMJan 7, 2018 at 6:15 AM

By Matthew Tota, Correspondent

FITCHBURG – A busy workday at Garden Remedies Inc. has a lot in common with one at a factory – or maybe a greenhouse, kitchen or laboratory – excluding, of course, the cannabis.

You could also throw in a hospital, as employees don medical scrubs, hairnets and masks as they whizz around bright, humid rooms packed with marijuana plants.

Members of the staff cook, garden, package and test, all part of a multi-million-dollar medical marijuana cultivation operation that keeps the shelves at the nonprofit’s Newton dispensary stocked with products like pot-infused honey, bath salts and lip balms.

A little more than five years after voters approved it at the polls, the state’s medical marijuana industry continues growing, with 17 medical marijuana dispensaries already open for sale and dozens more awaiting final approval.

In Worcester County, Sira Naturals Inc. is the other medical marijuana company open for business; it has a cultivation facility in Milford but sells in Cambridge and Somerville. According to the state Department of Public Health, 14 other medical marijuana establishments eyeing towns and cities in Worcester County are in different stages of the application process.

“What we’ve see in other markets like Colorado is it still has a fairly robust medical market,” said Jeff Herold, the company’s chief operations officer. “Massachusetts is unique in that if you compare it with California, which also has both medical and recreational, the medical marijuana purchases are not taxed, whereas in California it’s a lesser tax, but still not zero.”

Garden Remedies has not changed its plans for expansion despite the uncertainty surrounding how recreational marijuana sales will affect the medical side of the industry.

The company, which began growing marijuana at its 88,000-square-foot facility on Airport Road in May 2016, recently finished construction on new grow rooms, increasing its capacity by 130 percent. The facility can now hold up to 3,000 flowering marijuana plants and has space left for more construction.

Demand for products at Garden Remedies’ dispensary in Newton is strong, Mr. Herold said. The dispensary serves about 10 percent of the state’s 43,672 registered medical marijuana patients and sees more than 1,000 people come through its doors every week.

And in September, Garden Remedies added a free home-delivery service for Middlesex and Worcester counties. Depending on the need, Mr. Herold said, it may extend the service to the rest of the state.

The company employees more than 70 people, including 40 at the cultivation facility. “These aren’t minimum wage jobs,” Mr. Herold said. “It’s not a couple of hippies in a garage with a plant.”

The variety and difficulty of the jobs there were on display this week. The walls of each wing are marked with a color to signify the department – green for growing, yellow for laboratory and red for packaging – and every room buzzed with activity.

By noon, in the kitchen, head chef Chris Kittredge had already finished making 1,200 chocolates and 1,700 hard candies with a pure form of extracted marijuana oil called distillate. Mr. Kittredge said he and his sous chef recently experimented with marijuana barbecue and hot sauces, but they were not big sellers.

“The most popular item right now is the gummy candies, but the chocolates are getting up there quickly,” he said. “We’ve been making probably 2,000 chocolates a week.”

In another room, Kiersten Bankowski wrapped up more than a dozen cannabis bath bombs. Ms. Bankowski, who manufactures topicals for the dispensary, said she also produces several other skin care products, including lotions and oils.

“They’re really nice because you can get a deep soak for any aches and pains throughout the body,” Ms. Bankowski said of the bath bombs. “The lotion is for localized pain relief, and it makes your skin very soft. They’re products for people who are nervous about using cannabis.”

Much of the work at the facility deals with overseeing the growth of the plant itself, seeded in what Garden Remedies calls its own “super soil.” Every day, a team of 12 to 14 growers tends plants in various stages of growth; some plants they cut into thick hedges of green marijuana leaves, while others they let grow tall, pruning everything but the tops.

The six grow rooms hold an average of 500 plants each. The facility’s two newest grow rooms are its largest, housing more than 600 plants.

Surveying the crop in one room, Sean O’Loughlin, the company’s director of cultivation quality control and logistics, described them as happy, healthy plants. “These plants are looking very vigorous,” he said.

In general, he said, the large rooms yield approximately 200 pounds of dry cannabis about every four months, with the smaller rooms producing about 130 pounds. He stressed, though, that those totals can change based on several factors, including the amount of light in the room and the fluctuation in temperature outside.

“A good harvest is the next harvest,” Mr. O’Loughlin said. “But the numbers keep going up.”

Sanitation at the facility is critical, he said. His assistants wear gloves and cover their heads when handling the plants. They also go through air and water showers before punching in for the day.

“If you get a disease that gets into a cutting and spreads throughout a grow room, you could lose an entire crop,” Mr. O’Loughlin said. “We’re talking millions of dollars in product.”

Security at the facility is also important. Garden Remedies employs a former Massachusetts state trooper as its head of security. The building has hundreds of cameras monitoring every corner, and entry to each room requires a key card or access code.

Every gram of marijuana is accounted for, Mr. O’Loughlin said, and the state’s seed-to-sale tracking means he knows where to find each plant in the building.

“People see that all of a sudden you have thousands and thousands of pounds of cannabis being grown in your community and think, 'How much of that is getting into the junior high school?’ ” Mr. O’Loughlin said. “None of it is. It’s a false perception, and a lot of the stigma around this industry perpetuates that.”

Although they acknowledge that stigma, Fitchburg officials have seen local benefits to hosting medical marijuana companies like Garden Remedies.

The city has signed Community Host Agreements with five other medical marijuana companies, City Solicitor Vincent Pusateri said, all for cultivation facilities. The agreements will translate into $130,000 in additional tax revenue and up to $1 million in annual payments that will go toward helping improve the city.

Mr. Pusateri said the city is in the early stages of negotiating a Community Host Agreement with Garden Remedies, as one was never established before it opened.

“They’re employing people. The mayor has toured the facility with his staff, and they were impressed with it,” Mr. Pusateri said of Garden Remedies. “We really do identify it as a pharmaceutical enterprise.”

He said the city has had no problems with Garden Remedies in the two years it has been on Airport Road.

Given the opportunity, Mr. O’Loughlin said he would give tours at Garden Remedies to anyone who still believes the medical marijuana industry can be a detriment to the city.

“If I have to walk everybody through this facility to get them to understand this is a viable, clean industry, and I don’t have dreadlocks, and I’m not running around in sandals smoking bongs on the warehouse floor, then that’s what I’ll do,” he said.

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